


A Brave Man

by ArcaneAddict



Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Gonna be called Morganing it soon, John Wicking it, Revenge, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-08-24 08:20:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16636310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArcaneAddict/pseuds/ArcaneAddict
Summary: Arthur tries to tell people he's not a good man. Sometimes they listen, sometimes they don't.





	A Brave Man

**Author's Note:**

> SPOILERS AHEAD: some of this information is related to previous relationships of Arthur Morgan that are revealed late in the game. Nothing major, just a lot of sadness.
> 
> I wanted to write a pure revenge story focused on the dark side of everyone's favorite cowboy. He keeps fighting against the idea that he's a good person. So I wanted to explore why. Set in the aftermath of the death of his lover/wife Eliza and their son Isacc. Some asshole murdered them over a couple of bucks and you know Arthur isn't letting that go. I picked Amos as the name of the murderer at random. Seemed like it fit the setting.

Took him about a week to catch up.

Little weasel had more boltholes and hideaways than a gopher. Arthur would uncover one, just to find the warm ashes of a fire and an empty bedroll. He destroyed them one by one. Houses and sheds were easy, those burned. Dynamite took care of the root cellars and caves. Man ever circled back around, all he would find was rubble and ruin.

He knew this would be the day he finally got his hands on the bastard because the distance between his stops got shorter and shorter. Arthur hadn’t slept for a couple days, maybe more and though he didn’t feel it, he knew the other man was tiring.

Amos. Biblical name, like Hosea. 

He’d burn that down, too. Make the memory of a man disappear like smoke into the sky.

First though, first he had to deal with the squirming, crying, begging little bastard and he wasn’t sure how to make this hurt as much as he needed.

So, he lit a cigarette and sat down, smoked awhile while Amos struggled against his restraints. The soft spring earth smeared all over the outlaw’s already filthy clothes. Tears streaked through the dirt on his face.

“You don’t wanna do this,” he wailed, “You’re just a kid, you’ve got the wrong man, you ain’t got it in you.”

Arthur watched the ash drop off the end of his cigarette and sputter out on the damp new grass.

“See, that’s where you’re wrong, mister,” he said, “Maybe I didn’t have it in me before, but now? Now, you put it there.”

He knelt next to the man and put out the embers of the cigarette on the man’s skin.

“You put it there,” he continued steadily, against a background of screams, “When you put a goddamn bullet in my wife and my boy. For ten bucks. Ten bucks they didn’t have to give you, and you put a woman and her baby in the ground. My woman. My baby.”

The thief sucked down a sob, swallowed hard, Adam’s apple bobbing in his stubble-covered throat.

“That your aim?” he whispered trembling, “You putting me in the ground, kid?”

Arthur laughed.

“Sure,” he said, “But not yet.”

Funny enough, he hit on his plan from watching a horse thief get hanged. Small man, maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet and the hangman for that town was a cruel bastard, or so everyone said. When the trap door dropped, there wasn’t a snap but a gurgle. Sounded like he was drowning on dry land, his whole underfed body twitching and writhing for longer than Arthur thought possible. A woman cried out to God for mercy, but still, he juddered and shook and moaned around the gag until a bloody froth showed and his eyes stilled, bulging out of his purple face. 

What it came down to was that it looked like it really fucking hurt and that is what Arthur Morgan required.

He gagged him, made sure his legs and arms were well bound before he put the rope around his neck. The man turned boneless at first, a terrified sack of jelly right up until the slack tightened and then he stood straight enough, right up on the tips of his toes that dug into the wet earth for purchase. The noose around his neck looped over the tree branch; the braided length the only connection between the two men now. 

Arthur took his time, smoked another cigarette from the back of his horse. He made sure the rope was knotted good and tight around the saddle’s pommel.

“A man once told me something that didn’t make much sense at the time,” he said, “Said, ‘A coward dies a thousand times, a brave man dies but once’. Probably from one of his books, he likes to put on airs. Anyhow, it got me thinking. One death really ain’t enough for a piece of shit like you. So, I’m going to do my very best to make it closer to a thousand.”

It didn’t take much. The horse took a few halting backward steps and Amos was off his feet, his moan of despair cut off along with his ability to breath. 

When the red of his cheeks started to go dusky, Arthur urged the horse forward and the man’s body collapsed on the ground. Somehow, he worked off the gag and soon as he caught his breath, started to screech for mercy.

“Please, not this. Not like this, just shoot me.”

Arthur meant for him to stay on the ground a bit longer, but his vision went white and when he came to, the man was up in the air again, dancing and bobbing.

“You son of a bitch, you open your mouth to me? You want to tell me how you want to die?” He screamed the words and his horses’ ears twitched at the sound. “You think that’s how Eliza wanted to go? My little boy? You think I wouldn’t skin you alive and feed you to my dog, just so I could see them one more time?”

He’d been tamping down the rage and it threatened now to ruin his plan. The red had started to turn blue before Arthur tamed himself enough to urge the horse forward. 

Back and forth. Up and down. The tree limb was sturdy and that was good, because the friction of the rope and the weight of a body acted like a saw. Took longer and longer for Amos to come around between hangings. The whites of his eyes turned red with blood and the noises he made, well, they weren’t human anymore by the time dusk rolled around. Truth be told, Arthur would’ve gone longer but the horse was starting to tire. 

He let the man fall to the ground and he dismounted his horse and found what he was looking for in his saddlebags. He drove the railroad spike deep into the earth and left it there for the moment as he walked towards the mumbling Amos. The knife cut the wrist ropes loose. 

“You still with me?” A prod, then a slap. “You’re not dead yet, you bastard, wake up.”

A kind of keening noise whistled out through bloody lips.

“Good. Now, you pay attention, because this is important. Right now?” He picked up the severed ropes he’d cut from around the man’s wrists. “Right now, your life is in your hands. How long you manage to hold onto it, well, that’s entirely up to you. And that? That is a luxury my wife and child did not have.”

He backed the horse up once more time and loosed the rope, used his own body weight to keep the rope tight as he looped it around the spike fixed in the ground. 

Amos caught on quick enough. He reached his hands above his head and caught hold of the rope. His arms shook with the effort it took to heave himself up enough to loosen the noose around his neck to breath. When they first started, maybe he might have had the strength to pull himself up, up all the way and climb the rope into the tree itself. But not anymore.

Gave himself enough air to talk though.

“My momma,” he rasped, “She never hurt anyone. Please. Tell her.”

Arthur looked up from his journal.

“Mhm,” he said, “You got some last words to say?”

Amos’s arms shook.

“Tell her where I died. So, she don’t worry. Alice Trent, post office in Salem, Georgia.”

Arthur took note in his careful, looped handwriting and he saw the relief on the other man’s face. It soured fast when he tore out the page. He lit up another cigarette and used the guttering match to light the corner of the paper.

“She ain’t never gonna know how you died, boy. You’re getting tired, real tired. Soon enough, you’re gonna let loose of that rope and you won’t come back up for air. Then I’m taking every part of you that someone might recognize, maybe someone who loved you once. Then, I’m putting you into the mud. Right down in that sucking bog cut into so many goddamn pieces, God himself couldn’t puzzle a man out of it.”

It surprised him, truth be told, what the man did next. Didn’t blubber anymore, didn’t cry. Amos heaved himself up, up the rope, groaning with the effort until he’d gained himself about a foot or two of slack. 

Then he just…let go.

There it was. The snap.

A little leg kick or two but it was over. 

Took longer than he thought to butcher a man. That’s how come they caught up with him. Hosea said “My God” more like an actual prayer than a curse. For once, Dutch didn’t say anything, maybe because Arthur stared at them both with a dare in his eyes to say anything, to say shit, while he was elbows deep in blood and gore he followed through on his promise. Pieces of Amos lay around him in a circle where he knelt on the ground.

Dutch didn’t say anything at all, just came up and took the knife out of his hand. Been a long time since he could make Arthur do anything, but Arthur was tired, more tired than he knew after all that long chase.

“Hey there,” Dutch said, low and soft like he was coaxing a horse, “You had us all worried, son. Come on back and let’s get you cleaned up, hmm? Leave this mess behind.”

Arthur stiffened and shook his head.

“Job isn’t over, Dutch,” he said, “I’m not going until it’s done. So, you either help me or you get the hell out.”

He knew if anything would turn Dutch away, it would be this. The man wasn’t a dandy for nothing and he hated to get his hands dirty. He had a distaste for blood and this wasn’t just blood. It was the rank stench of shit in softening intestines and piss-soaked clothes, sweat, tears, every fluid that was supposed to make a man.

“Hell, Arthur,” Dutch said, “I don’t know what you’re asking me to do. He's done, he's in pieces." His tone softened even more, coaxing. "Hosea and I, we figure out a way to burn this, that enough? We make this go away and you come back?”

The older man was talking to him like he was a little kid again, promising that everything was going to be just fine, don’t you worry about it Arthur, I got this all figured out. 

Arthur’s chin dropped down to his chest and his hands fell to his sides as his shoulders sagged in defeat.

“This ain’t ever going away Dutch,” he gasped out, “Not this.”

He hardly felt himself in his own body, the weight of Dutch’s arm around his shoulders barely recognized as a touch at all.

“Hey. Hey. I’m with you, son. I’m with you.”

That was it. He didn’t try to console him. No fancy embroidered speech, just a simple statement of fact. An arm around the shoulders, a low and steady voice. And if Arthur felt nothing but hollow now, later, he would remember and love the man for it. 

Same as he loved Hosea. The thin, wiry man kept his worried mouth shut and worked on unspooling wire leads as he planted charges. Around the tree, the body, the visceral mess Arthur had made. Give Hosea enough gunpowder and he could hide any sin. 

Took them two weeks to ride back over the distance Arthur had covered in a week.

Went slower and slower till if they went any slower, they would’ve been at a standstill.

“You want anyone to go with you, Arthur, you just say the word. You know that, right?”

Hosea was so earnest, his forehead crinkled with concern.

“Sure. I know it.”

He went up by himself anyways. Found the spot and stayed there until a storm came down and blew him off the mountain, the wind and rain harsh over the new-mounded graves.


End file.
